Blended learning incorporates online learning experiences and helps students for meaningful learning through flexible online information and communication technologies, reduced overcrowded classroom presence, and planned teaching and learning experience. This study has conducted surveys of various tools, techniques, frameworks, and models useful for blended learning. This article has prepared a comprehensive survey of student, teacher, and management experiences in blended learning courses during COVID-19 and pre-COVID-19 times. The survey will be useful to faculty members, students, and management to adopt new tools and mindsets for positive outcomes. This work reports on implementing and assessing blended learning at two different universities (University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, India, and Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India). The assessments prepare the benefits and challenges of learning (by students) and teaching (by faculty) blended learning courses with different online learning tools. Additionally, student performance in the traditional and blended learning courses was compared to list the concerns about effectively shifting the face-to-face courses to a blended learning model in emergencies like COVID-19. As a result, it has been observed that blended learning is helpful for school, university, and professional training. A large set of online and e-learning platforms are developed in recent times that can be used in blended learning to improve the learner's abilities. The use of similar tools (Blackboard, CodeTantra, and g suite) has fulfilled the requirements of the two universities, and timely conducted and completed all academic activities during pandemic times.

Agriculture is crucial to the economic prosperity and development of India. Plant diseases can have a devastating influence towards food safety and a considerable loss in the production of agricultural products. Disease identification on the plant is essential for long-term agriculture sustainability. Manually monitoring plant diseases is difficult due to time limitations and the diversity of diseases. In the realm of agricultural inputs, automatic characterization of plant diseases is widely required. Based on performance out of all image-processing methods, is better suited for solving this task. This work investigates plant diseases in grapevines. Leaf blight, Black rot, stable, and Black measles are the four types of diseases found in grape plants. Several earlier research proposals using machine learning algorithms were created to detect one or two diseases in grape plant leaves; no one offers a complete detection of all four diseases. The photos are taken from the plant village dataset in order to use transfer learning to retrain the EfficientNet B7 deep architecture. Following the transfer learning, the collected features are down-sampled using a Logistic Regression technique. Finally, the most discriminant traits are identified with the highest constant accuracy of 98.7% using state-of-the-art classifiers after 92 epochs. Based on the simulation findings, an appropriate classifier for this application is also suggested. The proposed technique’s effectiveness is confirmed by a fair comparison to existing procedures.

People who work in dangerous environments include farmers, sailors, travelers, and mining workers. Due to the fact that they must evaluate the changes taking place in their immediate surroundings, they must gather information and data from the real world. It becomes crucial to regularly monitor meteorological parameters such air quality, rainfall, water level, pH value, wind direction and speed, temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, soil moisture, light intensity, and turbidity in order to avoid risks or calamities. Enhancing environmental standards is largely influenced by IoT. It greatly advances sustainable living with its innovative and cutting-edge techniques for monitoring air quality and treating water. With the aid of various sensors, microcontroller (Arduino Uno), GSM, Wi-Fi, and HTTP protocols, the suggested system is a real-time smart monitoring system based on the Internet of Things. Also, the proposed system has HTTP-based webpage enabled by Wi-Fi to transfer the data to remote locations. This technology makes it feasible to track changes in the weather from any location at any distance. The proposed system is a sophisticated, efficient, accurate, cost-effective, and dependable weather station that will be valuable to anyone who wants to monitor environmental changes on a regular basis.

Alzheimer is a progressive disease and it is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder. It is believed that the people with mild cognitive impairment are at high risk of developing this disease. According to the annual report released by the Alzheimer's Association®2020, Alzheimer is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Thus, there is a need of educating people about this disease, reducing the risks by militating the necessary precautions to disseminate its affect by diagnosing it at early stages. It is also important to propose some recent advancement in this research which can help in early prediction of the disease using machine learning techniques. This paper intends to develop the novel algorithm by proposing changes in the designing of capsule network for best prediction results and making the model computationally efficient. The research is conducted on the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) dataset with dimensions (373 X 15) to diagnose the labels into two groups, as demented and non-demented. The novelty lies in conducting the in-depth research in identifying the importance of features, correlation study between factors and density of data showing status of factors by studying hierarchical examination of all the data points available using exploratory data analysis. Several optimization functions are conducted on the variables and feature selection is done to make the model faster and more accurate. The claims have been validated by showing the correlation accuracy at several iterations and layers with an admissible accuracy of 92.39%. The model is compared with state-of-art deep learning classifiers taken as benchmarks using different performance metrics. The ablation study is conducted on the proposed model using OASIS dataset to justify the predictions of the model.

The rapid advancements in digital technologies have prompted organizations to embrace digital transformations (DTs) in order to enhance efficiency, gain a competitive advantage, and achieve long-term sustainability objectives. However, the successful adoption of innovative digital technologies necessitates the careful consideration of various factors, such as stakeholder engagement, resource allocation, risk mitigation, and the availability of resources and implementation support. This study examines the sustainable adoption of innovative digital technologies (DTs) within digital transformations. The data for this study were collected from 760 stakeholders through a questionnaire survey and analyzed using SPSS software (Version 27). This study’s results underscore the significance of considering the efficiency of the transformation process and the long-term sustainability outcomes for organizations. The findings of the analysis clarify that integrating sustainability principles and DT has a positive impact on the effectiveness of the transformation, as indicated by environmental, social, and economic performance indicators. This study’s novelty lies in its focus on incorporating sustainability principles into the digital transformation process. The results of this study demonstrate that organizations’ long-term sustainability outcomes are enhanced when their digital transformation goals align with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The purpose of this study emphasizes the importance of arranging digital transformations with sustainable objectives to ensure the overall success and longevity of transformation efforts.

The planet Earth is being affected by a series of wildfires, which have been steadily increasing over the last two decades. Forests have undergone deforestation due to natural forest fires and forest fires caused by man. These events are occurring on a global scale, and in Brazil, these wildfires are having an extreme impact on the Amazon forest as well as other forest biomes. This article proposes a novel lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) model for wildfire detection through RGB images. This new method presents more advantages than the other methods used for the same task. Our CNN architecture can be used with aerial images from unmanned aerial vehicles and from video surveillance systems, combined with edge computing devices for image processing with a CNN. The proposed system is able to send wildfire alerts. The images do not have to be sent to a cloud computer as they can be processed in an edge device. However, it sends a string of alerts whenever a wildfire is detected. The evaluation of our proposed method showed that it required about 30 ms for the classification time, per image, and achieved an accuracy of 98.97% and an $F1$ -score of 95.77%, which is a very promising result.